The Mariners concluded their season a few days ago and the offseason is already running. We’ve got injury updates (Mitch Haniger – good!, Tom Murphy – bad!), revealing of a SUPER SECRET ALTERNATE, ALTERNATE TRAINING SITE, and a promise that the Mariners will seek to fill out a desperately thin major league roster by…..um……building a bullpen? Sure! If there’s anything our current times have made clear it’s that poorly thought out plans by underqualified people can and do succeed all the time. This might work! Go Mariners!

Anyway, the time for digging into the offseason is fast approaching, and we are excited to find out if it’s man flesh or midden heap for Mariner fans. This post is not about that. This post is about what happens when you open your MLB app, and see this:

By the empty, smoking charred chamber of ammunition within Félix Hernandez’s right arm what in the HELL is this? This, my dear Mariner fans, is “The Playoffs”. You probably have questions, so let’s get to them:

So………….like………….what?

“The Playoffs” are a short tournament played after the regular season has completed. This began way back in 1903 as the regular season champions of the American and National League playing a best-of-nine series, later shortened to best-of-seven. This is known as “The World Series”. (I am sorry for all these weird phrases and terms. We are speaking the language of success, and it doesn’t roll off the tongue.) 

When baseball expanded to a four-division format in 1969, “The Playoff” field was doubled to four teams. In 1995, baseball expanded to six divisions, three per league. They also added a Wild Card for the best second place record in each league, bringing “The Playoff” field to eight. In 2012 they league added a second Wild Card, before this year, thanks to COVID and the ability to extract sweet, sweet television revenue, baseball’s postseason ballooned all the way to 16 teams. 

This expansion to “The Playoffs” makes MLB, at least for 2020, the major American sports league with the highest percentage of its teams qualifying for the postseason. 

The Mariners, for the 19th consecutive season, through three different postseason formats, were not among those teams.

Wow this shit is wild. How does it work?

Again, this year is brand new. We’ve never done it like this before. Here’s a quick breakdown:

First round – Best of three

Second round – Best of five

Third round (League Champsionship Series) – Best of seven

The World Series – Best of seven

Best of three!?!? That’s crazy. Almost anything can happen in a short baseball series. Do the teams with the best regular season records get a bye?

No.

That doesn’t seem fair!

No it doesn’t.

Wow seems like something really crazy could happen and just totally invalidate the entire regular season’s accomplishments.

You said it, pal.

Huh so, this is just gonna be a one-off right? COVID is making everything crazy. 2021 is the return to the old format right?

Haha no that’s not how things that make rich people money work, silly.

So “The Playoffs” are really just kind of a scheme owners came up with to get more money?

Can we still enjoy them then? 

Yes! Absolutely. Particularly in a year filled with trial, pain, death, confusion, and fear nearly everywhere you turn, find the joy where you can and cling to it. Baseball is a great game, and high stakes baseball is a wonderful way to experience drama.

Who should I, as a Mariners fan, root for?

I personally will be rooting for the Dodgers of Los Angeles, both because they are the one sporting entity of that fair city I do not hate with my entire being, but also because the Dodgers attempts to annually field the best possible baseball team they can – cost be dammed – are an increasingly rare delight in the modern game, and deserve to be rewarded with a World Series itle. 

You could also root for the Brewers, since Daniel Vogelbach hit the absolute dog snot out of the baseball there, and we all love our big, burninating son don’t we?

Are the Mariners ever gonna get to do this crazy “The Playoffs” you’re talking about?

Ah yes well this is a question that deserves serious study, and so I must defer to my learned colleague Matt Ellis. Matt, what do the hallowed halls of academia say with regards to the Mariners future postseason prospects?

Shortly before his death on the run from the Nazis in 1940, German/Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an abstract but pivotal rumination on history and the myth of progress in the face of apocalypse. The most famous paragraph uses a painting by Paul Klee, named “The Angel of History,” which Benjamin reads as an image of time itself. The angel is faced looking backwards into the past, but its wings are open, and it is being blown ahead into a future it cannot see. All it can see, however, is the entire past. Where we as non-angels see just a string of random, unconnected events (here, lets say, Alvin Davis, the bunt, Game 161), the angel instead sees all of history as a single catastrophe: wreckage piled upon wreckage. We call this progress, thinking that those events will build to some great future. But the angel knows that it’s all just chaos, one single catastrophe. 

So maybe, I guess. But ask yourself: just how might this catastrophe play out when they finally get in, and the angel nevertheless is cast further into the unknown?

(Translation: maybe.)